About
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. I am primarily interested in change in constraining political and organizational regimes. For my dissertation project, I explore how authority and power are negotiated at the state/culture juncture in authoritarian regimes, regimes that envision culture as a political tool. Focusing on formal literary organizations, I examine how the Soviet literary field between 1954 and 1990 bargained its autonomous position in the face of political and ideological constraints. My investigation draws on theories of institutional change, innovation in ambiguous organizational environments, and culture, as well as a series of works that revise or reconstruct Bourdieu’s theories of action and literary field. The method that I favor is that of a combination of structural history, microhistory, and network analysis.
I also have an interest in the ways ideology is transformed into tools of bureaucratic control. For one of my projects, I work with oral history data, exploring how the entrenching of meritocratic ideology in American science structured female professional identities during the Cold War.
Prior to joining the Sociology department at Columbia University, I had a sales and marketing career in Indonesia, and worked as a research assistant. I currently live in Philadelphia with my husband and son, and spend my free time traveling, hiking, following events in Russia and neighboring regions, figuring out complex knitting patterns, and occasionally watching nordic noir.